


Like Brief Constellations

by terrible_titles



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Blasphemy, Drama, Grief/Mourning, Heaven & Hell, Humor, Hurt Crowley, I'm not entirely certain it's blasphemy but to be on the safe side for more sensitive readers, Multi, Narrator God (Good Omens), Post-Canon, Religious Conflict, Violence, War, also God is the embodiment of the shrug emoji, demons with very little imaginations get pretty excited by places named Death Valley, depends on Her mood, or the winking face, the war takes place in Death Valley California which perhaps should be its own warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-10-27 21:40:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20767349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/terrible_titles/pseuds/terrible_titles
Summary: I hadn’t known, when I was young, what I do now. That you can create something so far beyond the reaches of what you understand that they will go out and become something that you can no longer protect.An absentee God forces Aziraphale and Crowley to take up the slack when Heaven and Hell decide to end Her human experiment for good (and evil).





	1. stay with me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I’d rather have a monster I knew than one I didn’t. You go to Gabriel’s office, you know he’s going to try to kill you. You go to God’s office and don’t die in the labyrinth and riddles three first, you still don’t know what She’s going to do. And that's the real monster."_

Since their retirement, Aziraphale and Crowley had leaned into the whole humanity thing more than they’d like to admit. Aziraphale even insisted on going through proper channels to rent a cottage in the countryside, though Crowley spent a handful of miracles to ensure no one looked too closely at their history for it. Crowley was now the proud and sometimes angry caretaker of a vast garden where he piddled away his days like a proper retired man. Aziraphale got to spend most of his time in a lovely study surrounded by bookshelves without customers bothering him. 

They went to bed in the evenings and woke up in the mornings. Crowley had taken to eating breakfast rather than drinking it. Aziraphale actually slept instead of spending the entire night with reading material inappropriate for divine entities.

All in all, they didn’t mean to fit in with humanity--it all happened quite naturally. The ease of the routine, the cycle of their days continuing uninterrupted, gave them a comfort they never had during their working years. Their retirement was holding hands while taking long, meandering walks to nowhere, and never worrying about how to fudge your next report to make it look like you weren’t in love with your hereditary rival and a bunch of impulse creations who had gotten too frisky with some fruit.

In the evenings, Aziraphale would look brightly into the demonic eyes of his eternal partner and ask, “Bed, dear?”

And the Serpent of Eden would smile fondly back at an ethereal angel who once wielded a flaming sword in Heaven’s First War and say, “Of course,” and offer his arm like their bedroom wasn’t four strides down a short hallway. 

They slid in and out of each other’s days, and it was exactly the kind of neat life, knowing full well you were safely loved beyond all measure, that Aziraphale and Crowley had been made for. 

So when I say it was a lovely morning in the cottage when the company arrived, I mean that all mornings in Aziraphale and Crowley’s lives now were lovely, and that had little to do with the weather. Still, I will paint you a picture.

Crowley had been easily convinced to make pancakes with raspberry compote, Aziraphale’s tea was just the right temperature, and after Crowley sauntered off to his garden, Aziraphale settled in to whisk away the rest of the morning with an obscure Romantic poet. 

It was within this context that the angel answered a rare knock on the door. 

“Ah, Anathema,” he said with a proper smile. “Please, come in. Would you care for tea?”

Anathema stared at him, frowning. “It’s been twenty-five years since I saw you.”

(There were a few things about humanity Aziraphale and Crowley were still struggling with.) 

“Oh! Has it? You must excuse me, dear, for not being in touch. We’ve been quite busy here, getting ourselves settled.”

“_Twenty-five years._ Aren’t you curious how I found you? I didn’t even know your name.”

Aziraphale thought about it. “Not really,” he decided. “It’s been quite a bit of time for you, has it?” He tilted his head, one hand still holding open the door, and took in the witch’s appearance. She had grayed a bit around the crown of her head, although brown still predominated. Stern lines appeared around her eyes and mouth, and the bones in her face appeared sharper through slightly thinner skin. Her dress was still horrendous.

Anathema, enterprising as always, only took a few seconds to dismiss the concern of a quarter of a century. She moved past him, a bit rude and hurried, and then turned in the foyer. “I believe I got some of your mail. Tea would be okay.” 

She took her tea black and disregarded Aziraphale’s food offerings and a seat, preferring to pace instead. Aziraphale watched her pleasantly. He was in a good mood. He’d had a nice morning. “My mail?” he coaxed. 

“Right, yes, I had a vision. I have those at times, despite all the—despite being through with it. But this one was for you.” She fumbled through an over-large bag with hideous rose print and pulled out a thin purple notebook about the size of her palm scrawled over with cramped writing. “I wrote down what I could remember, then hopped the first plane here to tell you.” 

“You’re in America again?”

She gazed up at him through her over-large bifocals. “I’ve been in America for twenty years.” 

“How about your young man?”

She cringed. “Newt? Hardly young now, I’d assume. And he stayed here.” She bit the end of a pen that suddenly appeared in hand. “With our son,” she mumbled around the pen, eyes a bit unfocused. 

“You have a son?” Aziraphale exclaimed brightly. 

“Yes,” Anathema answered, then flipped through the notebook and with no prelude, began, “_Aziraphale. I apologize for the inconvenience of using this human to deliver a message, but as you know, you’re no longer checking your dreams for conveyances from Heaven and we are not allowed to find you on Earth. So, really, the inconvenience is all on you._”

“Do you know who—”

“_You’re probably very busy finding human indulgences to further pervert your issued corporation which is still technically just a LOAN, by the way, but since no one else seems concerned with that—_”

“Oh, right.” 

“_Look, the deal is, people Up here are getting pretty restless, and apparently there’s been some relationship with the people Down there going on for a while. Of course no one tells ME about these things._” 

Anathema looked up. “And that’s when I asked if I should be writing all of this down, and he snapped impatiently at me and said, ‘_Of course, you idiot, what human doesn’t write everything down when they receive an angelic visitation?_’ and I said that I am spammed quite enough with odd dreams and am unsure which ones are important, and besides I wasn’t really doing the prophet thing anymore—”

Aziraphale’s eyes flickered back to the notepad, then to Anathema, then to the notepad. He thought about reaching for it, but that seemed awfully rude, and it was at that moment of conflict Crowley waltzed in, plucked the pad from her hands, and scanned the rest of her notes. 

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, some forces in Heaven and Hell have decided to go rogue and kill all the humans.” He tossed the pad on the table. “Hey, Book Girl. What’s up?” 

“Anathema,” Anathema said, and blinked. “My name is Anathema Device.” 

“Yeah, all right. Look, Aziraphale, why would Fucking Gabriel care enough about the humans to contact _you_?”

Aziraphale shrugged, looked mild. “I suppose angels change. Killing off all the humans might be extreme, even for him.” 

“Should I be worried?” Anathema asked. 

“No,” Aziraphale said at the same time Crowley said, “Very.” 

Anathema left shortly afterward, a bit confused, but more disturbed. She would be in town for a bit, she said. Her son had a baby now, and she’d like to visit her new granddaughter, and also know more about this ending human life thing when they figured it out. 

“Is it odd that they wouldn’t even warn us?” Aziraphale asked, wandering around his study with his second generous pour of scotch. “It’s like we don’t exist. If Gabriel hadn’t wanted something from me, we wouldn’t even know until it was all over.” 

“That was kind of the point of the switch, Angel,” Crowley said, sprawled in some partial lounging position that shouldn’t technically be possible in the armchair he’d claimed. “We asked to be left alone, and they did. Look, who knows what Gabriel is on about anyway. A couple of rogue demons and angels getting together and deciding to end human life? It will never happen.” 

“I…” Aziraphale glanced Crowley’s way, then settled into the desk chair across from him. “I need to speak to him. He asked me to come see him.” 

“Last time ‘you’ spoke to him, he tried to obliterate you with Hellfire. My money’s on this whole thing being a massive trap with you literally being shoved into a pit of the stuff by the end.” 

“He vowed that I would be safe. And Michael also delivered holy water to Hell so they could obliterate you.” Aziraphale mused over the rim of his glass, running a finger along the curves. “I don’t think it’s just a few rogue angels. If Michael has a connection there, it could be fairly serious.” 

Crowley leaned up, just a little, mouth a firmly straight line. “What are you going to do, Angel?” he asked, a sharp edge in his voice. 

And it wasn’t that Aziraphale wanted to see Gabriel, probably no more than Gabriel wanted to see him. But they had all scoured Anathema’s notes, searching for what was about to happen. Gabriel was very vague on the details, though, which led Crowley to the trap theory. Still, Aziraphale kept thinking of Michael with her perfect hands on a crystal clear pitcher of holy water, shining like a beacon among off the demons in Hell, ready to sully herself to help them get their revenge. 

Demons and angels came from the same stock, after all, and that stock tended to hold grudges and have poor impulse control. 

So Aziraphale decided to go to Heaven. 

He wouldn’t let Crowley trade places and go to Heaven for him again, and the demon threw quite the temper tantrum about it the entire drive to London (because he’d insisted, of course, on at least driving Aziraphale to the door). 

“They’ll kill you,” Crowley said during his angry portion of the drive. (He’d begged, he’d cajoled, he even tried to tempt, but Aziraphale was nothing if not stubborn and set in his ways.) “They’ll fucking kill you; you’re a complete moron if you think this isn’t the biggest fucking trap in the world and you’re just going to stepping right into it, and you’ll _die_, and I’ll be left with all these fucking books of yours, what do you even do with books?”

“Read them, dear,” Aziraphale said, giving him a quick peck on the cheek before stepping out of the car and straightening his bowtie. “I’ll be back in a jiff. I promise.” 

Crowley worked his jaw, then sat very deliberately and watched the angel walk all the way to the door, and continued to watch a long time afterwards. 

It was quite possibly the meanest thing the angel had ever done to him. 

***

Archangels had pretty nice offices in Heaven, and Gabriel managed to somehow land one of the better ones, despite there, of course, being no real way to determine “better” without admitting a few indulgences. His was one those, a corner office with spotless glass windows looking out onto the curve of the Earth and into the vast brightness of Heaven. The design was immaculate, all rounded corners and modern décor. Gabriel sat behind his desk and must have seen Aziraphale coming, but only glanced up when Aziraphale, feeling rather shabby, stood just inside the door. 

“You’re late,” Gabriel said.

Aziraphale wasn’t going to play on Gabriel’s terms today. Crowley had convinced him of that much, at least. “You gave your message to an _American_. It took her a few days to reach me.” 

“A few days? How do they ever get anything done on Earth?” Gabriel squinted at Aziraphale, assessing the angel with cool disapproval. 

Aziraphale spread his hands. “Regardless, Gabriel, I’m here now. Please. Explain.” 

Gabriel put his hands on his desk and stood. “You know I can’t name names, Aziraphale, but it seems this is more of a problem than I realized. I estimate nearly half of the angels have already been contacted about this demonic proposition, and there aren’t very many I think who wouldn’t take up the case should it be presented to them. The failed Armageddon was a rather stinging blow to everyone, you realize.” 

Aziraphale smiled pleasantly. “This all seems like more of a you problem, I'm afraid.” 

It was clear Gabriel wasn’t enjoying the bastard side of Aziraphale much. “How is ending human life on Earth _not_ an issue you’re concerned with—”

“Simple.” Aziraphale clasped his hands around his back and rocked on his heels with a knowing look. “God will never allow it.”

Gabriel stood back, then folded his arms and barked a laugh. “You are the most arrogant angel I’ve ever come across.” 

“She didn’t allow Armageddon to happen. Do you really think Crowley and I could have mucked it all up with a handful of children had She not wanted us to?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said emphatically. “But that isn’t the point. The point is, those sticky humans you love so much are all going to die. You’re the last person I’d want to ask for help, but I _need_ your help. Aziraphale.” Gabriel moved from behind his desk and past the other angel, gesturing for him to follow. “Let me show you something.” 

Aziraphale heaved a sigh of great annoyance and followed Gabriel down a set of stairs that looked so shiny and slick they should have both slid straight down them. Then another set of stairs, in a somewhat dimmer, sturdier looking area. Then another, and the walls were beginning to glow less with the blessed shine of Heaven and more with some sort of weird unidentifiable fungus. 

“Where _are_ you taking me, Gabriel?” Aziraphale demanded, and then he realized: Crowley was going to be absolutely insufferable when he found out he had been right. 

***

Aziraphale opened the door and seated himself in the Bentley two hours and twenty-five minutes later. Crowley had held his non-essential breath for all of it. The angel dusted some soot from his sleeves and wrinkled his nose in annoyance. 

“He tried to—”

“_Yes_, Crowley, he tried to shove me into a pit of flames, you were right, can we just—” He gestured at the windshield— “get on with it?”

Crowley frowned, buried his emotions, and managed to ask in a very steady voice, “Did you kill him?”

“I’m not quite to the level of killing archangels yet." Aziraphale fiddled with his cuffs, straightening them back down best he could with the edges frayed as they were. "We just had a rather nasty disagreement.”

“A disagreement.” Crowley arched an eyebrow. “About whether or not to murder you.” 

“Well, I won, obviously.” Aziraphale turned to him, exasperated. There was some soot on his cheek and his hair was fried at the ends. “Can we just go home?”

Crowley put the Bentley in gear and accelerated forward into a group of fleeing pedestrians, which Aziraphale hardly commented on. 

“So it’s worse than we thought,” Crowley said. “He’s trying to get rid of you before they do this. They don’t want you in their way again.”

“I thought you didn’t think this was a problem?” 

And Crowley allowed himself to snap, just a little. “I _lied_. Because you’re an _idiot_ who decided to go back to your would-be-murderers just because they asked nicely.” 

“I need to talk to God.” 

Crowley muttered a few exasperated curses, some of which were too modern for Aziraphale to catch. “What you don’t understand, Angel, what you _still somehow don’t understand_, is that God is the Bad Guy here. She’s not going to help us do anything. She never was. We’re all just some vast lab experiment to Her, best I can tell. We’re on our own.” 

“Oh, _God_ is the Bad Guy? Not, you know, that big red monster that nearly ate the world?”

“I’d rather have a monster I knew than one I didn’t.” Crowley was watching him, expression twisted in a snarl. “You go to Gabriel’s office, you know he’s going to try to kill you. You go to God’s office and don’t die in the labyrinth and riddles three first, you still don’t know what She’s going to do. And _that_ is the real monster.” 

“You’re quite cross with me!” Aziraphale exclaimed. 

“Of course I’m cross with you! Do you know how many times—” Crowley choked and swerved out of the way of a bicycle without Aziraphale even asking. 

Aziraphale grasped his wrist. “Darling, please.”

“How many times I’ve thought you were gone, again, since the shop? How many times I’ve woken up and you’re not there, you’re just in the kitchen or your study, but I’m never _sure_ for those first few seconds—”

“Crowley—”

The demon was all gritted teeth and a muscle was spasming in his jaw. He guessed he'd shot past composure at this point. “And you never bloody listen to me! You’re always doing what you want to do, because you still, after all this time, think God’s given you some sort of immunity to those monsters, instead of you just being incredibly, _incredibly_ lucky.” 

They were on the road out of town now in the fast-fading dusk, and Crowley’s fists were clenched tight on the steering wheel, ten and two. 

Aziraphale stayed silent. 

“My lot, it’s just what they do,” Crowley said, finally. “You expect them to want to blow up the world like some Bond villain. But yours? I don’t know what’s happened in Heaven, but it’s Not Good, and God’s allowing it, which means She’s Not Good either. You can’t just sit back and not intervene when your children go rogue and start killing each other, and still be thought of as fucking _good_.”

Aziraphale pursed his lips and watched the scenery fly by, darkening as they moved towards a very peaceful life they’d built together. He liked peaceful. He didn’t like thinking they’d have to give up the cottage. He didn’t like thinking they’d have to give up Earth. 

Crowley let that silence hold for another minute or so, then sighed, sped up, and moved his “two” hand over to hold one of Aziraphale’s. “Angel. I don’t want to fight. I’m sorry.” 

Aziraphale kept his eyes forward. He couldn’t dare look anywhere else at the moment. 

“I’m just,” Crowley began. 

“I know,” Aziraphale said, his neat teeth too close together. 

“I just get scared.” His voice was small with the admission. 

“No, dear,” Aziraphale said, softly, slowly. “You’re quite right, you know. I just don’t like to admit it, as it’s rather lonely, don’t you think? And when it comes down to it, the two of us against all of them? That’s not the sort of battle I like to fight.” He splayed his fingers and linked Crowley’s between them. His sigh came out shakily. “If God doesn’t care, what can we do?”

Crowley looked over, eyes fully off the road, and Aziraphale could see even through the glasses that the demon was giving him one of those soft looks he always wore as he was delivering him bad news. 

Then he pulled over.

They weren’t anywhere. Just a stretch of road with grass on each side. Night was bleeding from all corners now, and the stars were brightening in a way they never did in London. Crowley stepped out and went to Aziraphale’s side, tugging him along. “When’s the last time you looked at the stars, Angel?”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, remembering a night in 1941 when he followed a demon home because he’d saved his books and very much didn’t expect that the night would end up only including some constellation study. “I don’t know. They change so much over the years.” 

“But I remember them all.” Aziraphale’s heart leapt in his throat when Crowley grabbed both of his hands and looked up. Something about the vulnerability of that grounded him, and he couldn’t look away from how the skin on the demon’s neck moved as he spoke. “I remember how they shift, the pictures they paint when they come together in various ways. I remember how different it all looked In the Beginning than it does now. All weaving in and out on their own schedules, forming new patterns as they cross each other’s paths.” 

“Yes,” Aziraphale agreed, swallowing hard, “but what does—”

Crowley looked back down, eyes bright and piercing to Aziraphale’s core. “If God doesn’t care, _we can_.”

I can’t say why, but I was touched. 

So when they got home, Anathema was waiting with the news of another vision.


	2. hold my hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Crowley really couldn’t help it. “Maybe you should ask your God.”_   
_Aziraphale didn’t dignify that with an answer, but as he turned, he couldn’t stop a thought coming unbidden into his head. He turned back to Crowley._   
_“Maybe you should ask yours.”_

“I don’t want to do this,” Anathema said flatly, and refused to sit in any offered seats. “Can you tell the people who keep sending these messages that I would no longer like to receive them? Surely there’s another witch who would be happy to turn divine prophet.” 

Aziraphale clasped her hands. “I apologize, dear. It is very rude of them. If they listened to anything I said at all instead of immediately trying to obliterate me on sight, I would give them a piece of my mind, I can assure you.” 

Anathema tilted her head, the line of her lips serious as always. “That’s unfortunate. Well, it’s no matter.” She shook her head and walked past the both of them. “It wasn’t really a message, anyway. Just a very long scope of broken Earth, and hundreds of divine beings, and thousands of humans, and they are all fighting, but it’s wrong. It doesn’t look right. It looks like a stage play, but people are dying.” 

“The _humans_ were fighting? With, like, pointy objects?” 

Anathema looked at Crowley. “There are so many more humans, but they have no chance.” 

“Not if they’re trying to face off directly with an angel or demon,” Aziraphale said. 

Anathema’s brow creased. “It’s like we came to meet them with absolutely no plan or strategy. Like we just picked up a sword from a thrift store and wandered over to try to stick it in them. Why not a missile, or—I don’t know—literally _anything_ else?”

“Well, if we knew where this place was…” Crowley glanced at Anathema meaningfully, who shook her head. 

Aziraphale waved it away. “No, no, it’s fine. It must be mind control. Possession. Suggestion.” 

“They’re going to convince us to kill ourselves,” Anathema supplied. She stood very still and didn’t exactly pale, but Crowley caught the over-careful focus in her eyes, fighting to stay present. 

“Book Girl," he said, gently. "Your son and granddaughter. Where are they?”

“The city. I’m staying in their flat.” She gazed at him, a bit lost. “Why?”

“Go. We’ll figure this out. Just—don’t let them leave.” 

They walked her to her rental, bid her stay safe, reach out to them when she got back. Then Aziraphale turned on Crowley. 

“_We’ll figure it out?_” he hissed. 

Crowley shrugged. “It’s what she wanted.” 

“False comfort? What can we do, Crowley? We can’t fight thousands of our own kind.” 

Crowley cocked an eyebrow up and really couldn’t help it. “Maybe you should ask your God.”

Aziraphale didn’t dignify that with an answer, but as he turned, he couldn’t stop a thought coming unbidden into his head. He turned back to Crowley.

“Maybe you should ask yours.” 

***

Beelzebub was perturbed. 

They sat with their usual air of boredom, a hand on their chin, in a rolling chair at the edge of the long conference table in Heaven, since it was Heaven’s turn to host the meeting. And Beelzebub _hated_ Heaven. Far too sterile. Their flies were discontent to find not a scrap to feast on. 

“So you failed to kill the angel,” they commented as Gabriel sat in his own seat, as far away from them as possible. But Beelzebub was still immediately drawn to the absence of an eyebrow. “Surprising, seeing as Hellfire didn’t work the first time.” 

“How was I to know you didn’t rig it the first time,” Gabriel snapped. 

They rolled their eyes. “I suppose you know now. What, can’t miracle yourself a new brow?” 

“You know I can’t,” Gabriel hissed. 

That cheered up Beelzebub a bit. 

“And you’re really not going to even try to kill Crawly—” Uriel began. 

“Crowley,” Beelzebub clarified. 

“Yes, that.”

“No,” they answered. “I’m not an idiot. I don’t make the same mistakes twice.” 

Michael made a small noise at their side and Beelzebub turned on her, a swarm of flies flipping with them. Michael didn’t flinch. 

“Regardless,” they said, “can we determine the grudge against these two is pointless to our greater goal?”

“Not if they get in the way,” Gabriel groused. 

“I’m sorry, did you want to lose the other eyebrow? To match?” Beelzebub never did understand why Michael allowed him to talk. 

“We think there’s a simpler way,” Dagon supplied. 

“Simpler than smiting?” Sandalphon asked, disappointed. 

“We want to end the Earth experiment, correct?” Beelzebub asked. “But there are plenty of experiments out there. Why not just send them to one of those? They can find some other disgusting species to get along with.”

Gabriel slammed his hands hard into the table. “We are the best of the Heavenly Host and the worst of the Hellish Hordes. How can we not get rid of one angel and one demon?” 

“We are not here for your personal grudges, Gabriel,” Beelzebub said. “We’re here to destroy the entirety of the human race.” 

Michael cleared her throat. “They’re quite right, actually, Gabriel.” 

Gabriel looked very personally betrayed. 

“And perhaps it is best if we were to offer Aziraphale and Crowley this olive branch.” Before the other angels—particularly Sandalphon—could protest, she kept going. “Look, we’re all exhausted with the humans. Other contingents of the Host and Horde don’t deal with all this nonsense messing up the Plan elsewhere. It’s been six thousand years, and we’re out of a job if we don’t know what happens next. It needs to end. If all it takes to make that happen is offering these two a way out, shouldn’t we set aside our troubles with them and take it?” Michael turned to Beelzebub, who tossed her a bored expression, which they hoped covered up their complete and utter dismay at being supported. “What do we need to do? How can we help?”

Beelzebub scrunched their nose to hide their panic at such a generous offer. Beelzebub, after all, didn’t do generous offers. They weren’t really sure what they were, to be honest, but this felt like one. 

And to be fair, Michael wasn’t one to make those types of offers. They’d dealt with the archangel in the past, but on pretty simple terms that included bribery and threats, all easy enough for Beelzebub to understand. This was different entirely, and Michael’s face was as blank and unforthcoming as ever. 

“Well,” Beelzebub started, suddenly sitting up straighter in their chair. “Perhaps we might send a delegation—since I doubt either would come back _here_ now—and ask to… to parley?”

***

Adam Young had married Pepper in their mid-twenties and after a stint in the heart of the city enjoying all that had to offer, decided to settle in commuting distance outside London where Adam worked at an international ad agency and Pepper in politics. 

Adam was very, very good at his job and soon had a corner office not unlike Gabriel’s in a high rise downtown. He still had a crown of golden hair, but he had grown it out and kept it in a neat ponytail. Thin rounded glasses and a neat blue suit filled out his alarmingly stylish vibe. He was just ushering clients out of his office with some well-placed jokes when he spotted the angel and demon in his waiting area. 

Gray eyes focused intently on them, unyielding. His smile didn’t exactly die, but it grew curious in a way that sent shivers up both their spines. 

“If you’ll excuse me,” he said to the group, and walked over to Aziraphale and Crowley. “I suppose you’ll want to come in, but I’ll need to call Pepper into this meeting.”

And the meeting quickly morphed into drinks at a pub a few blocks away. 

“They can’t make us fight,” Pepper said immediately upon finding an angel, a demon, and her husband on their second round. She was all business—not much had changed from her youth. Her style was still eclectic and colorful, but also practical; her wide-legged green cargo pants held many pockets since she refused to carry a bag and a jangle of far too many keys hooked onto one of the many belt loops. Her wide eyes were as unabashedly daring as anyone’s might have the right to be, had they too told off one of the four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse as a child. 

“They can, actually,” Adam said mildly, scooting over to make room for her on the bench and gesturing the waitress for a drink. “There’s a number of things angels and demons can do, as I’m being informed of right now.” 

“Well, that shouldn’t be allowed,” Pepper returned indigently, and took a big swig of the pale ale placed in front of her. She turned to Adam. “I suppose you’ll need to deus ex machina some shit?”

“That’s what we were discussing.”

“Adam hasn’t used his power since then,” Pepper informed the angel and demon. “He’s had quite enough of it, thank you.”

“Er—well.”

Pepper flung her head around to stare at Adam, her hair bouncing hard on the turn. Crowley tossed Aziraphale a mischievous grin which the angel nervously ignored. 

Adam spread his hands on the table, a gesture alarmingly close to Gabriel’s. 

“About that, Pepper.” 

And it took several more drinks before Pepper became calm enough to speak somewhat reasonably again. 

*** 

I am interrupting here, because I believe questions will arise that neither the demon nor angel will ask or answer. The first—why would Adam keep his powers? The second—was he ever tempted to use them? The third—did he know what would happen?

I don’t answer questions, but I will answer these: 

I don’t know. 

I don’t know anything about Adam. At all. 

***

“And they want to parley,” Pepper said flatly, staring at Crowley. 

“Those were…” Aziraphale hesitated. “Beelzebub’s words.” 

“Anathema apparently figured out how phones worked and sent me a message this morning,” Crowley answered. “Michael and Beez hit her up in her dream last night.” 

“Really, Crowley,” Aziraphale protested, his nose wrinkled in much the same way it had when a bowl of beer nuts had been delivered to their table. “_Beez_?”

“Trying it out.”

“A bit too on the nose, I should think.” 

“I can’t say I’m at all interested in being part of this endeavor,” Adam said, calmly sipping his beer. “And I’m not saying it’s a trap, but—”

“Oh, we realize it’s a trap,” Crowley interrupted. “It’s always a fucking trap.” 

“But if we have you,” Aziraphale pointed out. “You’re our trump card, as it were. Perhaps we can get them to stand down just be reminding them you exist, and you could stop it whenever you wanted.”

Pepper had been silent for two minutes or so, which was an awfully long time for her. She swirled her finger in the sweat of her mug and then said, a bit softer than normal, “They want to take us like cattle to the slaughter, Adam.” 

He looked at her curiously, and she met his eyes, fearless. 

“Those two can’t stop it,” she said, nodding to the angel and demon. “If their powers are similar to the other angels and demons, they’re vastly outnumbered. But you—”

“I’m different.” He didn’t break eye contact. He held very, very still. “Pepper.”

She shook her head. “Don’t, or I’ll change my mind.”

Adam moved his hand over hers where it was tilted into the warming stein. “You’ll go with me,” he said. 

“Of course I will,” she snapped, pulling their hands back but holding on. “Who else will call out these idiot occult overlords on their inability to conceive of compassionate solutions?” She grabbed her drink with the hand that wasn’t holding Adam’s more tightly than necessary and muttered into it, “Killing off the human race because they didn’t get their way, honestly. How childish.” 

*** 

Adam, Pepper, Aziraphale, and Crowley stepped into the middle of the broken Earth, the same that had appeared in Anathema’s dream. This turned out to be Death Valley, because Dagon had found out it was a region that actually existed and became overly excited about the potential of a place named such. She was, in fact, among the celestials’ chosen four for the parley: Beezelbub, Dagon, Michael, and Sandalphon. And she was barely containing her glee, crooked teeth breaking out of her nearly-adorable smile. 

“Don’t stoop to their level,” Pepper hissed from their side. “We won’t fight. We’ll refuse. They can’t force us to, after all. Not with Adam here.” 

Adam stared down at her and smiled, just a little, and it was not at all anything but genuine. 

Dagon waved. 

“We—er—we don’t want to fight you,” Aziraphale announced as they came closer, hands up already in a gesture of surrender, gaze flickering nervously to Michael and Sandalphon. “And you’ve tried to kill me so many times already, so.”

“We aren’t here to hurt you,” Michael said, her voice a little less clipped than usual. “I am sorry for Gabriel.” 

“Well,” Aziraphale said. “Aren’t we all.” 

“We’re here to parley,” Beelzebub announced too loudly. “It’s a thing, where we come to discuss things and don’t kill each other while we do it.” 

Crowley snorted. “I know what parley is. But it doesn’t matter if you and Michael both appear to our human prophet. Surely we are past any pretense that angels can’t lie.” 

A small noise of protest appeared to his left where Aziraphale stood.

Michael stepped forward. “We all know this world has gone on for too long. We know what She designed it for, and we can’t have it continuing on past its due date. It’s hardly healthy.” 

“Not healthy at all,” Dagon agreed vehemently, looking around the long bare skies and cracked ground like she was staring at candy.

“We know you don’t want to return to Hell, Crowley,” Beelzebub added. “And it seems Heaven’s pretty happy without you, Aziraphale. So we’re offering a truce. We’ll allow you to find another planet—any at all, except that one with the slime creatures; we couldn’t get their office on the line to agree to host you—and we’ll make certain you won’t be bothered.”

Pepper cleared her throat. “_Excuse_ you _all_, we’re _right_ here.” 

Beelzebub flicked their eyes the woman. “Right, so you are.” 

“We didn’t work out an agreement for you and the—” Michael hesitated, her calm expression meeting Adam’s intent one— “antichrist. Unfortunately. You are very much part of the whole Earth experiment, after all. You can see the problem.” 

Sandalphon’s gold teeth shined as he moved forward. “Of course, you can always put up a fight.”

Michael rolled her eyes. “_Please_, Sandalphon.” 

“We don’t want a deal,” Pepper said. “I don’t know why you’re so bothered by us. Can’t you just leave us alone?” 

“Our purpose is to not leave you alone.” Dagon growled, eagerly studying her pray as one eyes a tasty morsel on the desert table at the Ritz. “You were made for us.” 

“The humans were made for Her,” Aziraphale corrected. “We were ordered to protect them. To serve them. 

“I think you’ve mistaken us, Aziraphale,” Michael said. “We’re not debating the matter. There is no choice here. You and your demon have nothing to do with what’s happening. You can take our offer, or you can leave it. We won’t try to harm you again. But your special abilities seem limited to defense, and you know as well as I that you can’t stop us. And I admit to having a bit of curiosity: what will you do when there’s no one left here on Earth? Where will you go?” 

Adam, at last, sauntered into the mix, his mouth tilted in something that seemed nearly a smile, if it weren’t so chilling. “You’re forgetting something,” he said, casually. 

“Oh!” Michael turned to him, then Sandalphon. “We are, aren’t we?”

Everything that happened next happened very quickly. All Aziraphale saw was the angel’s hand bleeding into a blur of sharpness and Sandalphon lunging forward with it. He heard a bitten off shout—Crowley—and a guttural cry—Pepper—and a suffocating plea—himself—before a spray of blood in his face caused him to flinch, closing out the scene entirely. When he opened his eyes again, Adam’s heart was stuck clean at the end of Sandalphon’s claws and his body had collapsed lifeless onto the pale ground beneath them.

Silence stretched. 

Aziraphale looked up, his mouth open.

Then—“_No, you monsters!_” and Pepper nearly flung herself into the fray before Crowley caught her, swinging her around. 

“We will be fair, of course,” Michael continued, as if the blood Sandalphon ripped from Adam’s body weren’t sullying her own bleach-white suit. “We ask for 100,000 humans a day, to battle a thousand of our number. They will be supplied with appropriate weaponry.”

“‘Ask’ being a fairly generous term here,” Beelzebub clarified. 

“And the offer still stands, Aziraphale. I suggest you take it, before—”

“Before you’ve murdered them all?” Aziraphale managed, choking on the stale iron taste in his mouth. 

“Until they have bested us in battle, or we them,” Dagon supplied, nearly vibrating with eagerness. “Will she be starting us off?” She pointed with her chin towards Pepper, who locked eyes on the demon and made a sudden sharp twist in Crowley’s grip, howling and desperate to break free. 

Aziraphale turned to Crowley and gave him a sharp nod. Crowley looked helplessly back at him, but the two of them snapped away from the field. 

And then the Guardian of the Eastern Gate of Eden stood alone in front of a group of murderers. And he let himself become angry.


	3. there's no need

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Crowley wanted to see Aziraphale again. He always did on nights like these when he and Pepper collapsed exhausted back in his flat. She slept too much and only spoke when she was angry about something. Crowley envied it. These days, he was always awake and he felt like his heart was bleeding out all over the floor._

“Take me back!” Pepper screamed, beating her fists into Crowley’s chest. “I’ll kill them! _Take me back!_”

Crowley grabbed her hands because she was actually getting close to bruising something. “Now, love, think. How do you think you’ll take down all the forces of Heaven and Hell? Because if you have a viable plan, I’m game.”

Pepper shook her head wordlessly, violent tears flinging in every direction. She jerked from his grasp hard enough she nearly brought down a statue sitting on a too-narrow-to-be-useful end table. He had brought her back to his flat instead of the home she shared with Adam. The flat had not been used in nearly three decades, but had kept itself miraculously clean in Crowley’s absence anyway. And now Pepper was going to wreck it. 

_All right, what would the angel do?_ Crowley asked himself as he realized he was steadily descending into a slap fight with a grieving woman. 

“Look, I don’t want to have to put you to sleep, but—”

“If you put me to sleep, I’ll _kill_ you.” Pepper glared at him, eyes puffy and raw. “They ripped out his _heart_, you _saw_ it, I will _never_ sleep again.” 

Crowley cringed at the too-recent memory. He was fairly good at repressing things, and doing so quickly, but Adam’s heart, removed from his body, an act of angelic sabotage because he loved too hard to prove useful. Crowley gritted his teeth with the pain of it, felt his own soul tugging, whispering the symbolism, the similarity, and because all of that too much, too overwhelming, he allowed the fire to take over. He grabbed Pepper, hard, under her arms, and brought her to his chest in a crushing embrace, snaked one long arm around her head to bring it down to his shoulder where she sobbed hard into his neck. 

“I know, I know,” he murmured into the chaotic, wiry hair at the top of her head. “Hush. I know it’s unfair. Always _so fucking unfair_.” 

She gradually stopped pushing at his chest and then began clutching him tighter, and that’s where Aziraphale found them both, crumpled in a heap on his floor. The angel took them in with a tired glance. Crowley looked up with pleading eyes because Pepper hadn’t stopped crying; he didn’t think she ever would, and he wondered if humans break like this. 

The angel knelt behind the woman and placed a hand on top of her head. “Sleep, dear, and dream of whatever you like best.” When Pepper slumped in Crowley’s arms, Aziraphale took the burden from him and brought her to his bed to rest. 

Crowley couldn’t find enough energy to leverage himself off the floor, so instead he brought his knees up to his chest loosely and leaned his head against the wall, following Aziraphale’s movements with his eyes until the angel came back to crouch in front of him. In the dim light, Aziraphale’s jacket shone dark with stains, random jets of the red blood of humans now crisscrossed over with the golden lifeblood of angels. Crowley averted his eyes. 

“What do we do now?” Crowley murmured.

“We can’t protect them all,” Aziraphale answered. “We can ask Anathema to teach us how to mark out safe spots with wards and miracle handfuls of humans at a time into those spaces where other celestials can’t pluck them, but there’s no way to contain billions of people behind painted walls. They’ll start tomorrow, and thousands will die every day, and there’s nothing we can do to save them. I suppose we may as well get used to that fact.” 

“Cheery,” Crowley noted. Then, soft, hesitant, “What happened out there, Angel?”

Aziraphale shook his head. “Sandalphon is dead,” he admitted, flicked his eyes to Crowley with a warning not to ask anything more. Crowley heeded it, only relieved that the golden blood wasn’t Aziraphale’s. He supposed they were killing angels now; that’s just where they were. 

“I’m out of ideas,” Crowley said, and struggled to not let his voice crack. 

Aziraphale’s hands ghosted over Crowley’s knees, his face. “You musn’t give up. Stay strong for me. I need to see Anathema to begin preparations. We can’t save everybody, Crowley, but the world began with only two of them and it can continue as long as we don’t lose them all.” 

Despite the angel’s gentle hands, Crowley couldn’t stop hearing the hardness in his voice. The distance in it. The blood stains on his waistcoat. Aziraphale felt so far away, and Crowley shoved his face into his knees so he didn’t have to see it. “I’ll take care of Pepper,” he said. “We’ll be here.” 

***

Crowley didn’t see Aziraphale again for several months. They separated across continents, gathering as many as they could within schools, churches, and community centers which they covered with wards to prevent the celestials from popping them into the battlefield. Aziraphale went to Africa, left Pepper and Crowley to cover as much of Europe and Asia as they could. They called in Wensleydale and Brian to help, asked Anathema and her family to work in the Americas, even pulled Madame Tracey and Shadwell from retirement to convince them to enact some witchcraft in the Caribbean islands where they had settled, but hundreds of thousands were still vanishing from the populace every day. 

Humanity caught on quickly, and soon the safe places they were marking were swarmed with people desperate for a space. In the meantime, the world _was_ ending with workers disappearing from their stations, parents stripped from their children, chaos in systems that could no longer operate without crucial people. Resource shortages, transportation stalled, contaminated water. With world leaders scrambling to find solutions for those who remained behind, people were going mad trying to figure out where their loved ones had disappeared to. 

The warding was a bit hopeless, a too-small bandage trying to cover a bleeding wound, and everyone involved knew it. In the end, it was all just a waiting game, and humans always lost those. 

Crowley wanted to see Aziraphale again. He always did on nights like these when he and Pepper collapsed exhausted back in his flat. She slept too much and only spoke when she was angry about something. Crowley envied it. These days, he was always awake and he felt like his heart was bleeding out all over the floor. He’d gotten too used to nights in bed with the angel, too used to lilies and lilacs and ferns so happy and vibrant he couldn’t even scold them. Forgot what biting words and falling into bleak unconsciousness was even like. 

Most nights while Pepper slept, he gave up and read from a pile of astronomy books he’d stolen from Aziraphale’s shop. 

Texts came in sporadically, of course, but Aziraphale wasn’t keen on texting and kept his messages curt and business-like. _Opened another in Kenya today. Already at capacity,_ and _I’ve heard the numbers in Laos are dropping too quickly. You might visit there next?_

Crowley always texted back, _whatever u need angel,_ and hoped Aziraphale understood that for what it was.

_I miss you, just a bit,_ Crowley thought as he traced the outlines of constellations in his books, thinking about stars coming in and out of patterns. Wondered if those patterns ever came back together, or if twenty-five years in a cottage was all he’d ever get. Maybe he was selfish to want more. 

And then Beelzebub was at his door one day. Not who he wanted to see, but he’d almost take it, had it not been for the presence of Pepper in the flat. 

“You might not want to be here,” Crowley suggested, but it was too late, Pepper had spotted the intrusion and was storming up to the Lord of the Flies. She was taller the Beelzebub and easily hooked her hands in their collar, pressing her face so close she could hear the buzz of insects all around her, though they were not apparent on Beelzebub’s earthly corporation. 

“I know how to kill you,” Pepper hissed. “I looked it up.” 

“Maybe you should hear me out first,” Beelzebub suggested, tilting their head. 

Crowley placed a hand on Pepper’s shoulder briefly, then crossed his arms. “All right, then. Let’s hear it.” 

Beelzebub peered around Pepper’s head into Crowley’s flat and wrinkled their nose. They always managed a cool air of disdain, even while being pulled up on their toes and threatened. “Yes, it appears the humans aren’t dying,” they said. “Not like they’re supposed to anyway.” 

Pepper’s shock loosened her grip and Beelzebub dropped down gracefully. “Where is Adam then?” she demanded. “Where have all the humans you’ve taken _gone_ if they aren’t dead?” 

“Oh, well, _he_ at least is dead, according to plan. But the others are somewhere nebulous, even when we kill them properly. Stuck somewhere. It seems there’s a clog in the system.” They glanced at Crowley. “You haven’t seen Death around anywhere, have you?”

“No,” Crowley said slowly, firmly. “Nowhere. How do you know the humans aren’t properly dead?”

“Their souls. They’re not leaving the battlefield.” 

“So there’s just a bunch of souls wandering around Death Valley, California?” Pepper asked. 

“Yes. It’s quite bothersome, telling them apart, and to be honest we’re all becoming a bit confused about who we have left to kill and who’s already dead. Quite crowded, too. This really is the most absurd place for a demon to claim on Earth, Crowley.” They pushed past Pepper, stepping into the narrow hallway. “Were you ever really a proper demon at all?”

“Oh yeah, sure, we’ll help you figure out what’s going wrong in your quest to kill all the humans, especially now you've insulted my flat,” Crowley said.

Beelzebub arched an eyebrow. “There is no need for sarcasm,” they said. “If you’ll note, I’ve come alone.” 

“I don’t care how you’ve come,” Pepper interrupted, and Crowley grabbed her by the collar and moved her back behind him. 

“So what are you here for, then? Get on with it.” Crowley gestured with one hand, the other still behind him to keep Pepper crowded in the corner of the doorway. 

Beelzebub turned and heaved a sigh as if the sight of both of them had ruined their day. “I’m _saying_, it’s possible we have made a miscalculation.” 

***

Beelzebub didn’t like to make miscalculations, but something about Crowley always caused them to. They didn’t like Crowley, truth be told. That was all right, though, for demons not to like each other. They’d put up with Crowley for a few millennia anyway because he’d done some pretty impressive bad deeds. But he’d also done a few mysterious deeds as well, like impersonate Jesus in order to convince a very annoying minor government official to become the Apostle Paul and create chaos in the early church. (Heaven and Hell had several meetings about who got that point on their scoreboard, and after copious amounts of alcohol and a one-night-stand with Gabriel Beelzebub didn’t like to think about, they all decided to write it off as a wash.) 

Beelzebub liked clear-cut evil plans. They liked staying in the lines. They liked something they could grasp.

So it wasn’t their favorite place in the world, standing in front of Crowley’s desk while he perched on the edge, the angry human woman glowering at them from the corner of the room. 

“The throne, that’s a thing?” Beelzebub asked, gesturing suspiciously. 

“Was a present,” Crowley dismissed with a wave. “So what are you proposing? Partner up, stop this whole thing? You think three celestials could help the humans any better than two?”

“Four,” Beelzebub corrected. 

“Oh?” 

“Yes.” Beelzebub didn’t clarify further. “I have an idea, actually. I’m surprised you hadn’t thought of it yet.” They looked at Pepper. “We’ll need her.” 

“I probably _have_ thought about it, and then dismissed it.” 

“The Horsepersons of the Apocalypse. They can balance the odds. But they won’t talk to celestials. They’re bound to Earth and its fate, and have no interest in discussing anything with us. So we need your human.” 

“Yeah, I don’t like that,” Crowley said, but Pepper was already grabbing her coat. 

“Move along,” she told them. “I don’t have all day.”

They found three of the horsepersons in a pub on the East End by process of elimination, as it was the one of the only pubs left in business in London, courtesy of a very enterprising and optimistic owner. 

“Can’t find Death,” Pollution explained, drunkenly, punctuated with a hiccup. “S’pose he’s busy. Forgot about us.” 

Famine clapped a hand on their shoulder. “Cheer up, dear, you have us. We’re not going anywhere.” 

War stared hard into her pint, arms folded, mouth tight. “They’re right, though. You celestials have taken over our business. What’s here for us, anymore? No wars but the big one going on and we weren’t invited to that.”

Crowley sauntered over to sit next to her, looping an arm around the back of her chair, then deciding quickly against it when she offered him a glare that might literally melt his face. “The angels and demons, they didn’t invite you. But the humans? They’re extending an offer right now."

Famine looked up from comforting Pollution, and Pepper stepped out from behind Beelzebub. She folded her arms, and something shaken crossed War’s expression. Then the horseperson took a long gulp from her pint and spun around on the barstool. 

“Well, if it isn’t the little peace bitch,” War said brightly. “How’s that working for you?”

Crowley reached over to settle a hand on Pepper’s arm, emitting a low-level miracled calm from it, one Aziraphale had taught him. But Pepper had hardened from an angry warrior burning hot to a bitter one iced over, and she didn’t need it. She strode right up to the stool, taking up loads of space she shouldn’t have had the physicality to contain, directly in front of the physical embodiment of War. 

“Let me be clear,” Pepper said. “As the representative of humanity, I am offering this alliance under the condition that you not lay a finger on any of us.” 

War chuckled. “Oh, darling, we never did.” 

“You want in on the action,” Pepper said. “But Heaven and Hell want to end life on Earth as quickly as possible, and you’ll die with the last human if they succeed. That’s why they didn’t invite you. It’s against your self-interest.” 

Pollution pulled themselves up out of their stupor. “Styrofoam doesn’t biodegrade at all,” they said dreamily. “And I love watching it. I’ll never need to leave.” 

Pepper took a deep breath and prepared to dissociate momentarily in order to plunge into a justification for continued human wastefulness. “Without humans, you’ll have to watch the same old Styrofoam take-out container for the rest of your eternal life. No new ones. Just the same old ones, forever. It’ll be awful.”

“Very boring,” Crowley agreed. 

Beelzebub hand shot out to pluck a fly hovering above the bar and zap it into their horde on another plane of existence. “I’m very bored right now, in fact,” they said in a monotone. “Miserable, really.” 

Famine leaned over. “Little girl—”

“I am _thirty-six—_”

“We’d love to get in there and mess about, but we are absent a fourth rider, as you can see.” He gestured. “And we need all four to ride.”

***

Aziraphale met Anathema back in Newt’s cottage in England which had been very thoroughly warded as it housed their son and grandchild. There was more work to be done directing those who could help to where they were needed most, try to distribute the burden as evenly as possible. But Anathema had sent Aziraphale a solitary text—_I know_—and so he had come. 

They sat across from each other in the living room, late at night, Anathema with her legs crossed on a soft chair, Aziraphale on the worn loveseat. Only candles burned, and their voices, when they finally emerged, were hushed. 

“You can’t keep this up forever,” Anathema said. 

“I used to be a warrior; I have the endurance.” 

“No, I mean, for your conscience’s sake.”

“Oh, I don’t pay attention that anymore. It’s never done me any good.” 

“Aziraphale.” Anathema leaned forward, her hands clasped, and the angel could see her eyes were more clouded than they had been, the lines around them more pronounced. She looked as exhausted as he felt. “You are keeping me up at night. You’re reaching out to me, whether you realize it or not, and I can smell the blood. I know you’re hunting him every time he comes back, and I know you’re murdering his corporation each time you find him again.”

“And if I could get my hands on some Hellfire, I might be able to stop doing that.” 

“Is that why you’re avoiding Crowley?”

This was, of course, the moment that Newt chose to walk in with a plate of late-night tea. “Oh! Terribly sorry. I’ll just—”

Anathema waved at him. “Don’t be silly about it, Newt.” 

Newt hesitated, clearly not understanding what was sillier, leaving or staying. 

“Please join us,” Aziraphale asked, bordering on the rude for making the offer in his host’s own abode. 

“I’ll be blunt,” Anathema said as Aziraphale picked up the herbal offering and sniffed cautiously. “You’re not meant for this sort of hardness. Your soul can’t manage it, and neither can I.” 

Aziraphale looked at everything but her, eyes flickering to crocheted blankets and delicate figurines on shelves with too few books. A window was open and the curtains picked up the breeze. They blurred in his vision and he thought of the air exhaling through Sandalphon’s barely-used lungs, thought of that borrowed heart in his hands, willing it to be Sandalphon’s own. Angel blood coating his hands, and all he could think about, all he was _obsessed_ with, was finding a way to rid the world, Heaven, Hell, _everything_, of Sandalphon’s existence forever. 

No, he couldn’t see Crowley. Couldn’t risk it. 

Because Crowley, in his infinite generosity, would help. 

Newt sat awkwardly on the ottoman, looking down at his hands, still smooth but protruding with veins. His hairline had receded, the ends were gray, but his brown shirt was still rumpled and the nervousness still alight through his skin. 

“How many times?” he asked. 

Aziraphale shot him a vague look. 

“How many times have you, er, killed this angel, I mean?”

“Six,” Aziraphale said. “Once in Nambia, and I tracked him through the dunes in Morocco. He tried to return back to California once, near the battle, but I managed to intercept him before he got there. Then he tried to throw me off by coming down from Arctic Canada, but I found him on the border. Came up from Venezuela, too. Hardly very creative. And then—” 

“Here,” Anathema supplied. “You killed him outside my door.” 

Newt startled. “What? Why would he be _here_?” 

“I believe he thought to kill me first this time, before I could find him,” Aziraphale offered, spreading his hands. He ignored the tremble in them. He wasn’t sure if it was fear, or rage, or exhaustion. 

“You’re playing a dangerous game.” Anathema stood, then crossed the room to sit down next to him. “It won’t be so easy for you to return, if he gets to you first. They won’t simply issue you another body.” 

“Oh, Crowley loves heist movies. He’d find me one.” 

“You’re suffering. Please—” 

Aziraphale shook his head, but at that moment his cell dinged. He startled before realizing what it was, checking the screen to find a message from the demon himself—

_ beez and the horsepeople on board, 3 of them anyway, pepper’s subbing in for death since we can’t find him and they need 4 to get anywhere. silly rule if you ask me. meet you in cali?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two updates in a day because I'll be traveling so it might be next week 'till I get to 4. Thanks so much to those who are following along. <3


	4. to be brave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _And it all went wrong very quickly._

In Las Vegas, the horsepersons found Pepper a used motorbike that would be suitable. They also conjured up a scythe that was rather too long for Pepper and had to be shrunk down to size. She wasn’t sure exactly where to place it on the motorbike and fiddled about with it outside the shop for a good few minutes before Beelzebub agreed to keep it in their pocket dimension. 

Crowley shoved a black helmet on his head and climbed onto the bike behind Pepper. Beelzebub stood back, surveying the others as if they were being asked to decide which means of torture they’d most like to endure, electrodes or a good old-fashioned Catherine wheel. 

“Hop on,” War snapped, rolling her eyes. 

Beelzebub wrinkled their nose at the sharp red bike, deliberately stepped past it, and situated themselves behind Pollution. 

“I hate this,” they said. “Just be aware of that.”

Pollution’s smile crept across their face like poison.

The battlefield hadn’t been broached by humans who weren’t compelled. Crowley thought it weird, at first, that humans didn’t just follow their loved ones here, that no one had accidentally stumbled upon a celestial war taking place in their world. But when he first caught glimpse of it, he understood why. 

“Don’t look, and don't think,” War called to Pepper, voice carrying on the wind. “Keep your eyes on my back wheel, _and just follow_.” 

Crowley squeezed her upper arm. “You’ll be fine.” But he was a demon, and he lied. The brightness up ahead was blinding, and some force felt like it was going to bowl him over, leave him splayed on the desert floor. He swore he could hear voices, thousands of them, a vast angelic chorus so high and grating he wanted to tear off his ears; and the slithering wail of demons an uncurrent underneath, all demanding he stop here, forget everything, turn back. 

Pepper kept her eyes on War’s back wheel, though, and she forged ahead. Over the course of her life, she had been thrust in several directions, sometimes sharp course corrections. Many circumstances converged just so, forging her into something focused and hard, yet with great strength and compassion. One who could turn away from a friend when he had betrayed her, when innocence betrayed them both, and still search for peace on a bleak tarmac the day the world ended. One who could watch a man she loved violently die at the hand of an angel and then take up Death’s robes with the desire to preserve life. 

Pepper was a special woman, and a constellation of moments had designed her for this ride. 

One might say, even, intelligently. 

***

Aziraphale, on the other hand, took a less circuitous means to Death Valley. He didn’t like airplanes and had no humans to carry with him, so the cost in miracles didn’t seem too high to pay. And he was able to skip the barrier issue which would end up sapping Crowley and Beelzebub of a lot of their energy, landing quite healthily in the midst of a sprawling desert crowded with celestials, humans, and souls. 

Angels and demons didn’t need sleep, rest, food, and the humans were slaughtered before they even thought of their basic needs, and so there were no camps, no trenches. Just an endless push forward into new crowds of scared people, scraps of useless metal in hand, hundreds vanished in a single flare of smoke, a smiting column of light. The air smelled like blood and was hazy with heat and decay. The humans could not see the souls of those who had come before them—they walked dizzily through the lost—but Aziraphale could, and so could the celestials. It was as he’d heard; the war could not keep going much longer choked as it was with the remnants of their misdeeds. Something had to be done. 

Aziraphale turned from it and clenched his fists at his side. He met Gabriel’s violet eyes when he did and felt the familiar boiling in his gut. He didn’t look away. 

“You’re wasting your time on Sandalphon,” Gabriel said, his stroll casual, a long pike stained with human blood in hand. “We don’t need him here to finish the job, as you can see.” 

Aziraphale didn’t think; his hand shot out and he grabbed Gabriel by the throat, squeezing hard enough to crush the larynx before Gabriel can react. He discorporated then and there. 

It was not long after this that he was being tugged backwards. He couldn’t murder an archangel in front of the Heavenly Host and not expect retaliation, of course, and he would have thought of that had he been able to think of anything but how much he wanted to feel Gabriel die. Crowley would be disappointed when he found Aziraphale had come and gone before they’d been able to meet, and it was honestly selfish to expect Crowley to find him another corporation when there were so many more important things to do. 

These brief thoughts, disjointed as they were, hurried through Aziraphale’s head as Uriel flipped him onto his back and now held a sword to his neck, neat white teeth grimaced over him, and she was about to finish the blow when a hand grabbed hers. 

“Let me,” Michael said, gesturing for Uriel to move back, which the angel obediently did. The sharp lines of Michael’s face hovered over Aziraphale’s vision briefly, her skin somehow more blinding in the Californian sun, and then he felt himself being dragged up by the collar. “You couldn’t even wait for me to find you,” she hissed in his ear. “How am I supposed to let you live?”

“I don’t imagine you can,” Aziraphale returned, rolling his eyes up to the vast, clear heavens. It was a hot day. Too hot for his choice of clothing, had he a more human disposition.

She was pulling him away from Uriel, away from the earshot of other angels, and Aziraphale hardly had the capacity to care. She was more furious than he’d seen her, the hard edges of her breaking. “How dare you kill Gabriel _in front of me._”

Aziraphale choked a laugh and splayed out his hands towards the slaughter. “In front of you, Michael? Really? And what are you doing to God’s own creations _in front of me_?”

“I’m trying to keep you safe, _you fool_.”

Ah. “You’re Beelzebub’s partner.” 

Michael grabbed both Aziraphale’s hands in one of hers behind his back, and he felt the tip of a knife at his neck. “Move forward, and have the decency to act at least somewhat concerned for your—”

The sound of motors cut her off. Aziraphale’s eyes flickered with hers to the horizon, where four motorcycles were zipping fast towards them all. And above them, bloated gray clouds. 

***

“This might slow ‘em down long enough for you to do your trick,” Crowley managed to yell towards War as Pepper moved to ride alongside her now with the others. His teeth were gritted with the pained effort of dragging thick clouds through the celestial barrier. “It’s all I’ve got, so you have to make it work.” 

War’s helmet dipped in a nod, but kept forward. They were already coming close upon an outside ring of people, where lesser celestials picked off easier targets and herded the others towards the stronger angels and demons. The amount of people they were riding towards was staggering, and Crowley felt his hopes plummet with it. Even if War’s plan worked, they had already lost so many. 

Pepper was a hard line in front of him, though. He felt the tension bleed through her, could feel the despair from what she would be _allowing_ to happen with her presence. But she didn’t flinch. She didn’t cower. 

So Crowley swallowed his own fear for her and let it rain.

***

You see, celestials didn’t like to admit it, but they were rather afraid of rain—angels and demons, alike. It has, and always will be, a sign of My displeasure, and even demons who may no longer still love Me know enough to still fear Me. 

(I know that Crowley would like to argue about who stopped loving who first, but that’s a digression for another day.)

Regardless, from the first storm in Eden, celestials were hard-pressed to be anywhere around when they felt the rains begin.

Well, all except for two.

***

“What is this?” Michael remarked, shuddering as she felt the first drops splash on her skin. 

Aziraphale looked up, a smile growing on his face. “Crowley,” he said. 

***

All around the valley, thousands of angels and demons stopped their swords, their pikes, their maces, and looked up, then looked around, helplessly. Confused humans dropped heavy weapons their hands were unused to, many taking several steps back as their opponents were distracted.

War took off her helmet, shook out her hair with a grin. “Sorry we’re late to the party,” she said, sword appearing in hand. 

Famine disappeared from the group, appeared again on the opposite side of the battle in front of a group of demons looking to run. “Our invitation, it appears, had been lost.”

Pollution moved as well, and their smile upon a group of pristine angels was like black blood running down their chin. “Good thing,” they said, “because you have no idea how to run an apocalypse.” 

Pepper felt stiff and anonymous underneath her heavy robes. She slid off the motorbike, steadied it, and found the scythe in her hand suddenly, looked haplessly back at Beelzebub who studiously ignored her. Crowley’s eyes flicked over to hers, and he allowed the clouds to release.

“This is not supposed to happen!” Dagon’s strangled cry above the others was unmistakable somewhere in the fray. “I researched the average rainfall, and—”

“ENOUGH.” 

Pepper strode forward. Behind her was Beelzebub, armed with their own voice-enhancing miracles. 

“YOU HAVE PEVERTED THE NATURAL ORDER.” She knew her voice was threatening to wobble, but Beelzebub was thorough and the amplified boom of her words echoed through the battlefield with enough power to cover up the flaws. 

Still, within her robes, she heard the air emerge from her throat thin and reedy, and she had to swallow several times before she managed the next. 

“WE ARE HERE TO EVEN THE ODDS.” 

The sheets of rain whipped around her, around all of them, and the skies darkened with a dramatic flair. Crowley, satisfied, nodded and fell back a few steps with exhausted relief. War moved ahead of them into a group of humans. 

“Your weapon, love,” she said to one woman, shaking and wet. She wore a business suit and heels and had to step back a little to bring up a longsword, barely contained in both hands. War stroked it lovingly, like one might with a favored steed, and behind her hand trailed a line of water, different from the rain. Clearer and harder somehow. “You might try it now.” 

Silence fell like a deafening wave around them. Celestials were inching backwards, but War turned and stopped their retreat with a look that might or might not have been laced with a sort of persuasion magic. The human woman was probably crying. Pepper couldn’t tell from the rain, but her face was twisted horribly. She held her breath beneath her robes. 

War leaned over into the woman’s ear and whispered something, and suddenly the woman whipped around and stuck the sword deep into a stunned demonic creature.

Pepper wouldn’t ever manage to scrape the demonic scream from her mind as the creature melted away, blood and ichor and dissolution, agony beyond her comprehension. Beside her, Crowley winced. “Hate to see it,” he murmured to Beelzebub who grunted nonchalantly in reply. 

The woman, her eyes wide, turned to look at War. 

And suddenly thousands of celestials weren’t just discorporating occasionally from lucky blows; they were dying, souls and all, at the hands of holy swords, hellish blades, and renewed bloodlust. 

It all went wrong from there very quickly. 

***

Aziraphale’s cloud of white hair was moving towards Crowley, but mostly Crowley could just see Michael, her face pinched in frustration, her perfectly coifed hair falling apart in the wet, as she thrust him forward.

“That’s four,” Beelzebub said. 

“No,” Crowley said. “_Michael_?” He peered at the small Demon Lord, then back at the tall dapper angel dragging his in a zig-zag through the chaos. “All right then. It’s been a weird enough day. What say we get out of here before—”

The edge of Pepper’s hood turned slightly in Crowley’s peripheral vision. It sparked a very basic, instinctive fear within Crowley, and he momentarily forgot she wasn’t the real harbinger of Death. 

He turned. A human, a man—no, a boy, hardly older than his teens—and how did he get past without Crowley seeing? With a dagger, nonetheless? A holy dagger? Beelzebub was still craning their neck to see past the crowd of people a few yards away, watching Michael and Aziraphale come closer, and the look in the boy’s eyes concerned Crowley. Like he wasn’t all there. Famine had stripped the humans—just a little, he promised—of their fulfillment, starving them for violence, and this one was wild with it. 

His eyes went wide when realization slammed into him. The boy was moving fast for Beelzebub, and Crowley shouted, but it didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be able to move in time now, so Crowley lunged. Death was in the way, and her robes billowed and touched him as he went, grabbing at the boy’s dagger arm, which turned and slid into him. 

And it really _did_ go wrong _so fucking quickly_. 

He shut his eyes against the pain and cried out, and everything _stopped_. 

_Don’t look down don’t look down don’t look down._

All the noise from the battle had faded, so Crowley’s panting breath was very loud in his ears while his knees folded to the ground. 

“Darling, won’t you look at me?” Aziraphale whispered somewhere above him, and Crowley opened his eyes to a foggy halo of light that steadily sharpened back into the rich white-blonde curls crowning the angel’s head. Aziraphale offered him a smile, though something was bleeding behind it. Still, it was not tentative. Aziraphale would not falter in this. “There we are,” the angel said, and touched his jaw. 

“ ‘ziraphale,” Crowley managed. His tongue felt thick and swollen and he swallowed a few times, licked his lips. "Been a while.”

"I know." Aziraphale’s hand was soft in his bangs, pushing them back from his forehead, over and over again, rhythmically. “I'm so sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you I love you, that’s all.”

Crowley looked up. The clouds were broken and rays of light streamed down everywhere over puddles of glistening water filling slight depressions in the land, angels and demons and humans all in mid-fight. The world was silent. His hand was pressed to his stomach, but he couldn’t quite feel his body. If he had to guess, it wasn’t there anymore. Oh. _Oh._

Crowley lifted the hand holding onto the not-there wound, and it trembled through the not-quite-reality of its context. He wasn’t really reaching for anything. It was just that sudden bolt of fear choked him and he had to reach. The angel found it, though, clasped it between his, and he was still smiling, his eyes shimmering, his form hardened around it, trying to hold the broken pieces in place. 

“Angel,” Crowley said, and then wasn’t sure what to say after. There were many things that tumbled past his thoughts, fleeting and half-complete, and suddenly he didn’t know where he was going, and he was so scared, so terrified of being without Aziraphale in some dark place. His breath caught and he brought up another not-quite-there hand to scrabble at Aziraphale, fingers clenching the angel’s vest now, holding on to Aziraphale desperately. “Angel.” 

“Shh, sweetheart, I’m here.” Aziraphale steadied both Crowley’s hands with his. “You’ll be all right. You’ll—you’ll go to—” A faint hitch in Aziraphale’s voice that was quickly buried. His hands tightened over the demons’. “You’ll go to sleep now,” he said, still smiling. Oh, fuck. A low, keening whine emerged from Crowley’s throat and he started shaking his head, but Aziraphale continued. “And you’ll dream of what—whatever you like best, Crowley.” 

The frightened tears on Crowley’s face were strange, barely there, but Aziraphale brushed them away somehow and he felt so tired. “No. Please.”

“Darling,” Aziraphale said, his voice cracking very slightly, and the smile—_that fucking smile_—wavered at last. “Don’t be afraid.” He brought a wide hand to Crowley’s cheek and leaned forward. “I am with you. Always.”

Crowley would have liked very much to die tense, just as a final fuck you to the universe, he supposed, but it was hard not to relax when an angel looked at you like it might all be okay, really. And so he was gone, into the darkness. 

*** 

When he had no strength left to hold the frozen moment, the demon let go. Aziraphale didn’t think he even knew he had stopped time; it was simply instinct born out of fear. No constellation could hold forever, though, not even for a demon who loved it. Errant sparks of matter lost their hold on each other and scattered like so many stars across the sky, and Aziraphale didn’t care to know what sort of thing in the universe they might make next. It wasn’t Crowley any longer, and so it didn’t matter. He stood, his limbs heavy, the world dark at the edges, and turned.

Beelzebub stared at the empty place where Crowley’s body lay, eyes wide and disbelieving, hand wrapped tight around the windpipe of the murderous boy. Michael fidgeted—actually fidgeted—a step behind the demon prince, hand reaching out, faltering. Pepper was silent and still, and Aziraphale could not begin to guess at what her expression might be hidden underneath Death’s robes.

Aziraphale had done a lot of bad things, but he’d never felt so primitively wrong before. A bad thing and a wrong thing were very different, you see. The inherent paradox of bad things is that they very often felt good, but a wrong thing was something hindsight chose to slam into you one day like a Bentley into a bicycle. 

He could have stopped this, if he had stopped to think at all in the last few months. 

He looked up. Beelzebub was staring at him now and dropped the dead body they were holding like a guilty cat. It landed at Death’s feet, who crouched beside it, scythe standing tall above her. 

“It was you,” Beelzebub said. “You came to Hell in his place. He was never immune to holy water.” 

Aziraphale stared hard back at them. “You are all idiots,” he told them, slowly. Then looked around to find War, Pollution, and Famine looking on. “How could you possibly think this would make it _better_?”

“Perhaps you might be a fairer judge,” Michael said, “had you not been on your own personal murderous rampage, leaving them to their own devices.” And Aziraphale couldn’t even begin to process Michael—her person, her words, her hypocrisy. They broke apart in front of him like Crowley had just done.

War tried valiantly to look distraught, but failed. “We didn’t want him to end this way.” 

“Yes.” Aziraphale thought of Crowley’s fading body, relaxing with the empty promises of an angel rent from Heaven. “I know.” He walked over to War and plucked the flaming sword from her hand. 

***

It didn’t take much more than the horsepersons giving humans the means to outright kill them, the unrestrained, furious light of Aziraphale without Crowley, and a spot of rain showers to convince the celestials to pack it up early for the day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to add another chapter to the count--I'm working on 5 and to do justice to all of the differing character arcs was taking more words than I expected. 
> 
> Thanks so much for all of you following along! Come talk to me on tumblr at [Terrible-Titles](https://terrible-titles.tumblr.com/).


	5. all i ever wanted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Go on_, Crowley seemed to say. _If she offers once, don’t turn her down. Don’t look back. Take what she gives you. Run, before you can’t._

But let us rewind. 

Because, while Aziraphale and Crowley stretched a frozen moment, Death had her own. She knelt over the dead boy who had killed Crowley, who had been killed by Beelzebub. His name was Christian Loranzo. He was still a teenager, had been meant for college before all this started. He was still so young, and he had been plucked from his home in south Texas where his family hadn’t the means to make it to a shelter and were hiding out and hoping for the best. He came, blank-eyed, to Death Valley and found in his hands a sword he had no idea how to use. He missed his mother and sister. He wondered how they were doing. He hoped they were not here. Then, War gave him a gift, and Famine stripped his mind of his warm thoughts, and Pollution corrupted it with violence. He used his sword the only way he knew how, and now he was dead.

Pepper felt this the moment she set aside her scythe, knelt down, and placed her hand on his face. Then she was no longer Pepper. In a blink of an eye, something cold and soothing trickled through her throat, down her spine. She felt her flesh fade away and something hard and lasting stand in its place. Her fingers were chalk-white bones upon Christian’s flesh, and she could feel the sponginess of his soul underneath them, could bring that up if she wanted, could take it anywhere she wished. 

There were thousands of souls like Christian’s here which had steadily fallen out of their decaying bodies in the past months. Death could see them now. Could see where they had been forsaken by her. 

She didn’t quite have the knowledge to touch yet and her instinct was to immediately grab them up, take them where they were supposed to go, but that place was locked like a plunger in a drain. She felt so full, so overwhelmed; there was so much energy, so much soul-matter purposelessly vibrating in her essence. 

She was still young, this Death, and she did not understand, but she knew she was a player in this game. A piece on the board she could not see the whole of, and so she stayed with the humans, dead and dying, and put a hand on the empty wandering souls and promised she’d take them home, as soon as she could. 

***

“You can’t do that, ever again,” Anathema said, watching Aziraphale carefully as he stared up at the ceiling of her cottage. The angel mended himself slowly, attempting to weave back together the shreds of power he had expended, down to the last molecules which barely clung to his celestial form. 

“My dear,” Aziraphale said with a bitter note of humor, “I used to do that every day, before days were invented.” 

“Why would God ask you to hurt yourself like that?”

Aziraphale flicked his eyes towards her. She sat on a chair next to him, carefully dodging out of the way of his wings, which he had been too exhausted to put away.

“Because She mourned the Fallen,” he said, “with all the grief of one who would rather see them wiped from existence than leave Her.”

Anathema furrowed her brow, then crossed her legs with a sigh. “So She doesn’t like humans all that much, then, if She left that fruit in the garden so they could leave Her too?”

“I think She was young, in those days. Love is selfish, when you’re young. It likes to test.”

“And now? It’s distant?”

“Too painful.” 

“Anathema.” Newt moved into the room with a tea tray that he sat next to Aziraphale’s bed. “Perhaps we don’t need to talk about this, just now.” 

Anathema blinked. “All right, yes.” She walked past Newt, careful not to brush by him, and he watched her, blinking owlishly behind his glasses, before turning back to the angel. 

“Try to eat something,” he said. 

Aziraphale ignored him, focused again on reforming the broken threads of his power. The celestials wouldn’t be cowed by him for long. They’d come back once they had a plan in place for how to defeat the horsepersons’ tricks, and he’d have to be there too. 

After a few moments, he realized Newt was still standing there, staring, and he shifted upwards. “Thank you for recognizing that I needed a few moments of peace,” he said pointedly.

“I’m sorry,” Newt said, bowing his head. “I don’t mean to be intrusive, really, I don’t, but I’m not sure if I should leave.” 

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow. 

“I just—I know I’d need a friend, if I were in your shoes, as it were, and, well.” Newt gestured a bit haplessly, channeling his nervous energy from twenty years ago. 

“I have a friend,” Aziraphale said, “but he’s gone now.” 

“Yes, that’s, er, rather the point.” 

“And all I can do for him is repair myself and go back out to the battle and protect you, over and over again, until all the angels in Heaven and all the demons in Hell get so tired of me they go home for good. Or find a way to kill me. That’s what he’d want.” Aziraphale squinted up at the ceiling. “I think.” 

“Well, I don’t think he’d like the latter very much, anyway.” Newt sat down and pointed with his chin to the flaming sword, a bit less flaming now, on the bedside table. “Is that why you have your sword again?”

“Doesn’t quite feel like mine anymore.” 

“No, I suppose not.” His voice gentled. “You’ve spent thousands of years watching us, protecting us. Let us help you now.” 

Aziraphale glanced his way with a small smile. “I wasn’t protecting you. He was.” 

“And so you would have let us all burn in the apocalypse, if it weren’t for him?”

“Absolutely,” Aziraphale said, without hesitation. “I was an angel. I had my orders. I obeyed. I never questioned any of it, before him.” He turned over now, propped his head up, bit back a harder smile. “What do you think I’ll become without him?”

Years ago, the younger Newt might have been cowed by this, but now he only shifted the tea closer to the angel. “Don’t try to be frightening, please,” Newt said. “It’s not a good look on you. I know who you are.”

“The angel of Earth,” Aziraphale agreed, closing his eyes. The lines on his face were long, tired, pained. He leaned back again. “I appreciate your hospitality, dear, but please. Please, can you let me be?”

*** 

Beelzebub had nowhere to go. They didn’t like that feeling. Abdicating a throne in Hell was never their intention. They had come to like their throne. They didn’t want to leave it, and a few small leaps in logic indicated that if the humans weren’t being sorted into Heaven and Hell, there’d be no place for demons and angels any longer. Nothing for them to do. And Beelzebub didn’t really fancy a purposeless existence. They liked to rule. 

So they made their way back to Crowley’s flat, falling quick into the quickly-drying desert ground and emerging in his cheaply-imitated throne room. They said in the throne, alone, and thought about ruling over nothing, when an angel lit up the room so brightly they had to cover their eyes. 

“Ugh, Michael, turn it down, will you?”

“Yes, I apologize.” Michael at once dimmed her essence and stepped forward, hands clasped. “I don’t mean to intrude, but you left so quickly I did not have a chance to see if you were okay.” 

Beelzebub closed their eyes and tilted their head back on the throne, frowning deeply. “Of course I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be? That idiot Crowley stepped in—”

“He sacrificed himself for you,” Michael interrupted. “Why would he do that?”

Beelzebub didn’t know. Very undemonic of him, actually, even if they had ever been friends. “He’s an idiot,” they answered flatly. “Always been. Always—always was.” 

Michael stepped forward again so that the only thing in between them now was the desk. She looked nearly hesitant, if that could ever be applied to an angel with such a stiff spine. “What do we do?”

“Not much _I_ can do,” Beelzebub answered. “Crowley’s sacrifice made it rather obvious I’d been the one to fetch ‘em. But you can still play your part in this whole deal off like a bad move. Might as well.” Beelzebub waved their hand, slouched forward more. 

“Beelzebub,” Michael said, and their name was like a helpless fountain in her voice. “That’s a sacrifice.” 

“Well,” Beelzebub grumbled, “if it is, it was one I was forced into.” 

Michael sat at the edge of the desk now, strangely casual. Her hair had been returned to full fluff, and though the light around her had dimmed, she could not rid herself of the glow in her cheeks and eyes. She was an angel of contrast—hard lines and soft hands. She reached one across to Beelzebub’s now. 

“I want to leave with you.” 

Beelzebub pressed their other hand into her cheek in an air of not-quite boredom. “We’re leaving?” 

“We must, I should think.” 

“Well, you aren’t coming with me. This deal was a temporary truce, just long enough to push the rebels on the right track.” 

“Since when,” Michael said, exasperated, “has our truce ever been temporary?”

It was true, they’d spent more time in truce than opposed. Beelzebub flicked a glance upwards. “Well, we finally flew too close to the sun, Icarus,” Beelzebub opined, and it was not really a metaphor, because Icarus and Beelzebub were acquaintances. 

“I was scared to think you might have died back there, instead of the other demon,” Michael admitted. “I am glad you did not. I like you. Let’s run away.”

Beelzebub recognized the irony, sitting in the now-dead Crowley’s flat with the echo of him in every wall. 

_Go on_, he seemed to say. _If she offers once, don’t turn her down. Don’t look back. Take what she gives you. Run, before you can’t._

Beelzebub thrust themselves out of the throne and took the angel’s soft hand in their own. “If you insist,” they said. Crowley had died for Beelzebub, whether he meant to or not, and so they figured they might as well corrupt an angel in his honor. 

***

Aziraphale didn’t allow it to hurt very much. Well, the whole Crowley bit, anyway. The raw power he used each day in preventing the celestials from coming back to hurt more humans—that hurt quite a bit, like being scrubbed clean too harshly. His skin felt like it was peeling back every night, opening some gaping part of himself that would trickle out remnants of decaying energy like blood. That couldn’t be healthy, but it felt nice, to have something to focus on as he rested. Something that wasn’t his demon disappearing into the ether. 

“You can’t do this forever,” Anathema warned him, placing another tea tray Newt had made. 

He knew that. What’s worse, the celestials knew that. They could bide their time, the bastards, and he and the humans were always, always running out of it. Adam was gone. Crowley was gone. Soon, he would be gone as well. And he’d have been all right with that, really, the way things were going. Some part of him even _craved_ it. But Anathema watched him with wary eyes beneath heavy glasses, and he remembered she had a grandchild here in this house. 

“I know, my dear,” he whispered. “But I don’t know what to do.” 

Anathema leaned over his bed. “Where is he?”

Aziraphale opened his mouth, closed it. Wanted to shout, wanted to cry, but settled with a nostalgic hiss. “Why would you ask me that? Do you not think I would have sought him out, if I knew? I’d have gone anywhere, only I couldn’t afford the time to search for him. Because I’ve been rather busy _saving you_.” 

She shook her head. “Not the demon. Where is Adam?” 

***

Aziraphale didn’t know where Crowley went, didn’t know what happened to demons when they died from their plane of existence. He might have asked Crowley in the thousands of years he’d known him, but from the naked fear in Crowley’s eyes before Aziraphale soothed him away, he thought he might not want to know. 

Adam, though. He knew more about that. 

The offices of Heaven looked a bit more disorganized than they had been when Aziraphale stopped making regular visits a couple of decades ago. This was oddly a comfort, that even Heaven wasn’t immune to the damages of this war they have been complicit in starting. Aziraphale walked in, finding no creature amid the overturned desks and scorch-marked columns. He went to the soul-sorting room and found Adam there, sitting peaceably on a white bench, waiting for his number to be called. 

“They’re not going to find a place for me, are they?” Adam said with a good-natured laugh. 

“Not anytime soon, I’m afraid,” Aziraphale answered. 

“No, I don’t suppose this soul-sorting business is as easy as it used to be.” Adam clasped his hands onto his pants legs. He looked a bit younger than he had been when he died. His hair was shorter, curlier. He didn’t wear glasses, and his posture was less sure. Aziraphale wondered if that was a deliberate portrait of how humanity saw itself when they looked in a mirror—the sharpness of responsibility coming on all too quickly, billions of consequences landing harder than they would have before, when they were still under the protective care of guardians who knew right from wrong. 

All the parents in Heaven were gone now, leaving a shaken, insightful boy and an angel who suddenly felt far too old for his corporation in their wake.

“I need your help.” Aziraphale watched the lean man carefully, remembered the hand he held when they had faced Lucifer together, and hoped. 

“You’ve lost him,” Adam said, standing.

“I—” Aziraphale hesitated, swallowing the lump of emotion back down. “Yes,” he admitted. “Crowley’s gone. So I need you. I can get you back to Earth, if you will agree to protect them.” 

Adam’s smile was crooked, but his eyes were serious; they always saw too much. “You want to resurrect me,” he said. 

“Let—let’s not be blasphemous about it,” he replied. 

“What does that make you, if I do it?”

“_Adam_,” Aziraphale said, exasperated. 

“Because I know what it makes me.” 

“For _God’s_ sake, Adam, won’t you just—”

“No.” He took a step towards the angel, fearless. “Definitely not for God’s sake. And I won’t do this at all, if you’re simply running around impulsively trying to sort things back to right again. You haven’t stopped since this whole thing started, and now that you’ve lost the demon, you don’t have anyone to keep you steady. You’re unbalanced. You don’t know up from down. Good from bad.” 

Aziraphale felt the rage boiling up in him, quick and hot, felt a flare of light. “I am an _angel_—” 

“And you don’t scare me.” Adam was nose-to-nose with Aziraphale now, but just a bit taller, and looking down at him. “Angels aren’t good, demons aren’t bad; things aren’t as simple as they used to be, not since the Garden. You haven’t been sure what’s good since you gave away your sword, Aziraphale—you’ve just been skating by, hoping you can trust your instincts. But you can never really tell, can you? Not completely. And you can’t make it right again.”

Aziraphale trembled, took a step backwards. “Temptation doesn’t become you, Adam.”

“You didn’t do the good thing. Might not have even done the bad one either.” Adam shrugged. “Maybe the demon will lie to you, but I won’t.”

“All right!” A shaky breath, an attempt towards calm. “Fine. Fine. What do you want, then?”

“I want you to stop, for just one moment, and admit to yourself what you’re doing here.” 

So he did. Aziraphale stopped. He looked around the empty white room, the abandoned reception desk, the screens all showing a number one away from the one Adam had imprinted on his wrist. Heaven had been stuck in this limbo, trying to decide what to do with him, since he died. Adam, waiting alone, while the war raged on below him—what did he know about it? Or was it simply left to his imagination, how Crowley and the others had died?

Then, as Aziraphale looked around once more, he realized there were no other souls to keep him company, and there really should be, considering how many of them he’d seen perish. But they couldn’t enter. Not until the Antichrist Who Refused to Be an Antichrist had been judged by his own killers. 

_All_ these souls would be judged by their killers, but Adam had been the stalwart against that; he’d died before any of them, bogged down their system in order to protect every soul that came afterwards from that unjust fate. 

Oh. And—was Crowley somewhere in this system? The brief hope dimmed quickly in his chest. No. Of course not. He was judged when he Fell. There were no second chances for angels. 

_But there could be. They could change the system._

He turned to Adam. Adam turned back, watched the realization in the angel’s eyes without comment, and Aziraphale crumpled to the bench, placing his head in his hands. He felt Adam sit next to him but couldn’t look up for a long moment. 

“I can’t, my dear,” Aziraphale said after taking a shuddering breath. “I don’t know what I should do.” Then, quieter, “Not without him.” 

“You are a greedy angel, aren’t you?” He thought he could hear Adam’s lopsided smile in the words, and it stung, because he sounded so much like Crowley, such honest affection for Aziraphale’s greed, eager to indulge. His eyes prickled; his nose burned. 

“Yes,” Aziraphale said hoarsely. “But I would give it all up—books and beauty and dessert—to be with you again.” 

Gentle hands touched his and brought them away from his face. Aziraphale looked up, saw the flame-red hair and the amber eyes, and couldn’t make sense of it.

“I would never ask that of you, Angel.” 

Aziraphale shivered, once. “Crowley—” His voice, raw, aching with fear and grief and hope.

Crowley shifted his thumb over the bones of Aziraphale’s knuckles, holding them close to his chest, a rhythmic, unconscious gesture. “Here. With you. _Always._” 

The angel’s eyes widened when, a few seconds later, he understood what had happened. There was nothing more Aziraphale wanted right now than to let the universe fold away until it was just him and Crowley, contained within the tiny fold of a book, a place-marker, one the reader might never get back to. He wanted to collapse forward into Crowley’s arms, to shake apart finally, in a way he hadn’t been able to do since he saw the demon burst into fragments on the battlefield. But to do that would be to render himself completely useless and he knew that Adam was still at their side, waiting, and Adam could take this away if he didn’t hold up his end of the bargain. 

“I will resurrect you,” he said to Adam, though he was looking at Crowley, watching to make sure, refusing to let him out of his vision. “I will make you their new Messiah. I will give you the powers of Heaven and Hell, contained within the potential and imagination of a human, which will make you the most powerful being to exist. And—because I will have made you this, _we_ will have made you this—”

Crowley went still, kneeling in front of him, still holding Aziraphale’s hands tightly as if he would float away. 

“You will be a part of us.” He didn’t break eye contact with the demon. “And we, you.”

“Aziraphale,” Crowley rasped, but could manage nothing else. 

“And what will that make us, Aziraphale?” Adam said carefully. 

“A new Trinity,” Aziraphale said, his voice threatening to waver before Crowley squeezed his hand, fortified him. “We will usurp the old, replace the rotten framework, give them all a chance to decide what is good or bad, or nothing and everything. How to live together. How to die.” He looked up, finally, to Adam. “They are, after all, old enough now to figure these things out for themselves.” 

Adam blinked, then slowly nodded, approving. And as soon as he consented, Aziraphale grabbed Crowley’s hand in one, Adam’s in the other, and together a demon and an angel _willed_ the former Antichrist, the soon-to-be Messiah, back into life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, thank you all so much for reading and commenting. I was a bit hesitant about doing a plot-heavy fic in this fandom, so your feedback is much appreciated. <3 Should have the final part up by next week!


	6. it's always you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Heaven wasn’t home for Aziraphale anymore. Neither, as it turned out, was Earth, when Crowley wasn’t around._

Nothing really gets one’s point across like a vast, empty room bathed in bright light, nearly on the edge of painful. Crowley stepped forward hesitantly, then looked back at Aziraphale, who was still grasping his hand. He had an idea of where he was. He’d been here before, long ago, and he was not sure he wanted to be back now.

“Angel?” he asked, voice pitched high. “Why take us here?”

Aziraphale shook his head. “I didn’t. At least, I didn’t mean to.” 

“No,” Adam agreed. He pulled away from Aziraphale’s grasp and nodded towards what looked to them a faint blue light at the corner of the room. “She did.” 

The light flashed a bit stronger, cooler tones emerging from the concentrated point to soften the blow of the white. “Yes,” I said. “Not that I don’t appreciate your position, Aziraphale, but you have overlooked a step in the process.”

Aziraphale’s eyes reflected my own essence, those shining blues like the sky on the First Day. They widened, and I saw myself. A younger version, perhaps, when I was a bit too restless, a bit too reckless, but loved with the staggering blow of a supernova before its quiet. 

The blue light—my blue light—darted forward fast, lingered on his cheek, and moved back again. Just to feel it. To feel him, again. He blinked, dazed. 

“No!” Crowley stepped close to Aziraphale, angled protectively. “You can’t just—you can’t come in now and muck with everything after you’ve let it all go to _shit_.” 

“Oh, dear Crowley,” I said. “My star.” 

Crowley blinked surprised tears away and shook his head, squeezed his fist, held onto his anger like a weapon. He was always like this. It was frustrating, when I was young, but we are older now and all I can think of is the swelling of affection I hold for him. 

“He’s right, you know.” Adam stood, unafraid. So brave, this boy who stood in front of his infernal father and denied him. “You can’t go away all these years and come back and expect us to still love you.”

“Child,” I murmur, and let my light drift close to him. He would deny me, as well, if I offered it.

He gritted his teeth. “I am not your child.” 

“You are,” I said. “You are mine. You all are. I love you. I understand my failures, my inadequacies, in your eyes. I have seen you. I have been you. I have loved you.” 

“Then why did you leave?” Crowley’s anger burst forth like a dam and broke on a sob. “Why did you—” 

Aziraphale placed a hand on his shoulder. “I think he means to say that you have abandoned your creations, and let them abuse each other. The humans can’t protect themselves from angels and demons.”

“It seems, my dear guardian, that they aren’t doing as badly as one might think they should.” 

Aziraphale huffed and dared a step forward. “They can’t outlast immortals. You know that.” 

I allowed myself a step forward to him too, ignored Crowley’s protest and Adam’s grimace. “I do know that.” 

Another step, my brave angel. “If you cannot or will not protect them, then let me. Let us.”

Ah. There we are. 

“All right.” And I lunged forward and surrounded him. Crowley cried out, made to stop me, and so I grabbed my wayward son and I took custody of my orphaned child too. Within the light, I was only a murmur and yet all they could hear, all they could see. I gifted them my world and all the creations within it. Everything I had so fearfully and wonderfully made and allowed then to spin off without me. 

I hadn’t known, when I was young, what I do now. That you can create something so far beyond the reaches of what you understand that they will go out and become something that you can no longer protect. 

All you can do is gift them everything you are, everything you know, everything you have—and then let them work it out for themselves.

_Is this it?_ my flame-haired demon child says. _This is You, leaving us, for good?_

_This is Me, watching you, knowing you are good._

*** 

Adam popped into being in the midst of the battlefield at the intersection of a staggering amount of bullets, swords, and fire, all of which immediately froze when he stepped forth, both hands out.

Beings of all celestial makeups fell back, probably because every soul in Heaven and Hell knew the boy who refused to be the Antichrist, and that he should be dead, but mostly because he was glowing, blues and yellows and greens all swimming their vision as he moved slightly. Adam’s gaze managed to circle around, take in all of them in a sweep. “You are done now,” he said. “I am here, and I’m protecting the humans. You will go home.”

Aziraphale felt the strange pull and snap of reality fraying, coming apart, and then back into place differently. The battlefield around them was swept clean of the debris and bodies, both live, dead, and immortal. They were alone, and Death Valley was no longer anything but the desert place in California it had always been, save for an impossible tree slowly trembling forth past the cracked ground. 

A memorial, Aziraphale understood as he watched Adam’s hard eyes. 

“What do we do with them?” Crowley lifted his hand, trying to focus his shivering aura into its corporation once more. “These souls, I mean.” He nodded at the tree where apples were hurriedly ripening.

Adam looked to Aziraphale, who was ignoring his own oddly-shimmering essence to study the human with a furrowed brow. He nodded once at him when Adam hesitated, uncharacteristically. “It’s your decision, my boy,” he said. 

Adam nodded back, once, a mirror of Aziraphale. “All right, then. Those who have died since my own death, and those who will die from now on, will be flung out into the universe. Some will come back to us with better knowledge, in different bodies; some will choose to rest among the stars. Perhaps a few of the old-fashioned ones will still find their way to Heaven or Hell, or some other version of the afterlife they believe into existence. Maybe something even I can’t think of.” Something of the old Adam came back and a grin began to break out over his lips. “The possibilities are endless, but for now I’m ready to go home.”

Aziraphale smiled softly. 

But Adam felt something dark slide into the edge of his vision. It was black and lilting; he almost felt a headache coming on as his gaze settled upon it. And then there it was: a hooded figure, a scythe, a warning. 

“Pepper?” Adam asked. 

She swept the hood back to confirm. She didn’t look older, necessarily, but it was as if a hard line had solidified in her face; her cheekbones stood out prominently; her eyes were sharp as ever, but deeper. 

Crowley stepped beside him, bent over to peer harder into the shorter Death’s face. “Oh,” he said. “You’re not just pretending anymore.” He looked back at Aziraphale. “This could be a thing.” 

I HAVE SPOK—

Pepper cleared her throat when the three of them winced back from her. 

“I have spoken with the former Death. We’ve reached an agreement. He’s retired now.” 

“Pepper,” Adam said, sharp, almost a note of hysterics in there if that was a thing Adam ever did. “What does that _mean_?”

“Things have been getting more complicated for the last century or so, and this whole—” She waved her hand— “_thing_ the angels and demons had going with the humans, and then Adam dying, it just became too much. He was stress-eating and had a migraine that wouldn’t quit.”

Crowley leaned back. “So you just decided, oh, the harbinger of the End of All Things can’t cut it, so I’ll just step in.”

Aziraphale, from behind them, spoke up, his eyebrow pinched in concern. “Dear girl. Do you understand what this is?”

Pepper looked from the angel, then to Adam, and a soft smile fell across her face. “I do,” she said, and when she leaned up to kiss him it was icy and promising, and Adam yielded to it. “And I know what you are,” she said. “I know what you did for everyone, and what you want to do. I want to help.”

Aziraphale turned away. Crowley studied them with a look torn between disgust and fascination. 

“Very well, then,” he said. “You go off and do your horseperson thing, I suppose. Create a new meaning for life and death. Whatever. We’ll just—be here.” 

As Pepper replaced her hood, Adam took her hand and moved forward with her, but turned back briefly. “Thank you,” he said. “Really. I don’t know what She did, exactly, but I feel as if I have a lot of work to do.”

“Yeah, yeah, we’ll check in, make sure those scary immortals have been cowed for a couple of centuries at least.” Crowley waved his hand which was gradually solidifying into something more familiar. “Get going.”

Aziraphale hesitated. “Please, find us if you need us. We won’t—we won’t be far from you.”

Adam grinned, heard the unspoken promise there. “At least for a bit, yeah?” He mounted Death’s motorbike behind her and nodded behind the angel and demon, towards the tree. “Don’t forget.” 

Death shoved her hood inside her helmet. WE WILL BE SEEING YOU, she said, and then, “Oh, I suppose that’s kind of an ominous thing for me to be saying now.”

Aziraphale gave a tentative wave, then turned and felt his stomach bottom out because Crowley was already walking away from him too. 

***

They had business. Adam’s business was on Earth, but Aziraphale had to check over the beaten-down troops in Heaven, and _boy_, were their faces red when they saw _him_. He had a rather unusual golden glow about him Up There, and Gabriel wisely kept Sandalphon away and did not mention that whole strangling business.

Only Uriel dared to ask, “But, Aziraphale, what are we supposed to _do_?” She looked around and cleared her throat. “…sir,” she added, bitten. 

He supposed he couldn’t ask them to provide guidance. The angels had proven themselves to not hold any sort of moral superiority when left to their own devices, after all, and Aziraphale didn’t know what She wanted from exactly when she made him this other thing, but he didn’t feel himself to be any more capable of providing moral stability now than before. 

So he said, “What they do, I suppose.” He looked around. “The humans, I mean. They live. They learn. They love. They grow… better.” 

“And they die,” Uriel said. “We don’t die.” 

Aziraphale shrugged. “She hasn’t given any of them a purpose in a couple thousand years, and they’ve gotten along just fine. Perhaps you will, too.” 

But before he could quite tear himself away from the angels’ pity party, Gabriel grabbed him for a moment alone. “Where did she go?”

“Michael?”

“No. Her. We all felt it when She spoke to you. We all felt something shift. What did She say?” 

“Oh, I don’t suppose I warranted knowing Her plans, but I believe She thought Her work on Earth quite finished, for now.” 

And he left Gabriel with his slightly stricken expression. Truth be told, Aziraphale wasn’t entirely unsympathetic. The Lord deciding to end Her silence for the first time in millennia just to fuck off and leave things to him and Crowley and some human boy who was supposed to end the world felt odd to him, too. But God wouldn’t be God if She were at all knowable. 

Still, Heaven wasn’t home for Aziraphale anymore. Neither, as it turned out, was Earth, when Crowley wasn’t around.

He returned to Earth, to London, to their pond, but the bread only hung limply from his hand and his gaze was upwards, watching the people mill about the park. Their lives—changed irrevocably, and perhaps a bit ineffably—yet mere days later life was as it always had been, a sweeping torrent of sameness. The differences, only told by those who stood vigil over the long millennia of their lives. It was a comfort to an angel who reveled in the details, in the spaces between the big moments. He could almost be happy here, if the weight on his chest wasn’t threatening to drown him. 

“Angel.” Crowley, behind him. Where he said he’d be. But Aziraphale couldn’t turn, even when a tentative hand landed on his shoulder. “Aziraphale.” 

He cleared his throat. “I am sorry,” he said, finally, pulling his arms behind him firmly before turning to Crowley, still not meeting his gaze. “I lied to you.”

A crease of confusion appeared in Crowley’s forehead. “You did?”

“You don’t—?” Aziraphale said, dropping his hands in incredulity. “Why, of course I did. Do you not—are you not _angry_ with me? Is that not why you’ve been avoiding me?”

Crowley shifted his weight from one foot to the other, jammed his hands in his pockets. “I’m not _avoiding_ you, Angel; I just had a few details of my own to wrap up after this whole end-of-the-world-part-two-are-we-gods-now-should-we-talk-about-that business.” 

“Details! What details? Surely all your business was wrapped up when you _died,_” Aziraphale snapped. “And, no.” 

“It’s not as if Hell hasn’t all gone to shit since Beelzebub fucked off and Satan’s been off sulking since the _first_ attempt at the apocalypse. And.” He hesitated. “To check on the cottage, if you must know,” Crowley answered sullenly. “You’ve let all my plants go wild while I was gone. Act like they don’t even know to be afraid of me anymore. And yeah, we’ll need to talk, even if you don’t want to, because we _really should._” He shrugged as if trying to toss something off his shoulders. “Is Michael gone from Heaven? Because I just wondered, her and Beez—”

“Yes, all right.” Aziraphale drew in a breath, then exhaled in annoyance. “I’m fairly certain the two of them flitted off God-knows-where because they’re not welcome at home anymore and Michael _deplores_ the humans.” He wrinkled his nose instead and turned back to the pond. 

“Well, good for them.” Crowley grinned and turned towards the pond too. “Hey, God knows where? That’s us now, right? We know where?”

Aziraphale glared at him out of the corner of his eye. “Really, Crowley.” But as he focused on Crowley in his peripheral vision, the dark presence at his side, he felt something akin to wholeness, like a piece of himself was sliding back into place. Crowley was his other part, after all, and Adam gave him back, because the universe wouldn’t be in balance without the two of them here, side by side, staring at ducks and arguing about the theological implications of their latest cock-up.

“I missed you,” Aziraphale said, trying for a light tone, but he couldn’t quite get there. 

Crowley shifted back to him. “I didn’t,” he said. “Because—you didn’t lie, Angel. When I—well, when I was gone, I dreamt of you, and you were with me, just as you said you’d be. The whole time, until Adam brought me back.”

_And dream of whatever you like best, Crowley._

“Oh.” Aziraphale felt the familiar itch of tears at his eyes. 

“I’m sorry I left you,” Crowley said softly, “for so many reasons. But I think, most of all, because you never left me. At least not… there.” 

“Then _why_ did you leave, right after? For someone who thinks we should talk so damn much, you certainly high-tailed it away from me before we had half a second to catch up on what, oh, I don’t know, a complete cessation of being is like for a celestial.”

Crowley stared at him hard for a few beats. “I am angry,” he said. “Not about whatever you thought you lied to me about, but—well, I don’t know. You left Pepper and me by the wayside while you were all up in Sandalphon’s business, and.” He shrugged again, shoved his hands as deep as they could go into skinny jeans, which was not very. “We made a mess of things without you.”

“Right.” Aziraphale cleared his throat, nodded. “Well, for what it’s worth, I rather made a mess of it without you.” 

“We’re not good without each other,” Crowley said. “I had hoped you knew that by now, but every time something happens—” 

“Yes. Yes, I know. But oh, Crowley, I was so—so _angry_, and I didn’t want you to see that.” 

“You can’t just hide away all the ugly bits, Aziraphale. That’s why I fell in love—”

Crowley stopped. Aziraphale stared. 

“Right.” Aziraphale sniffed, tucking his chin upwards in hopes a literal stiff upper lip might help him rein it in. “I know that. I know.”

“You’re different than them,” Crowley tried helplessly. “Why would you try to act like you weren’t?”

“Because I’m not!” Aziraphale couldn’t quite meet his eye. “You see them, when they get a thing in their head. They’re single-minded, relentless, _cruel._ And I—” 

“Aziraphale.”

“I would have killed him. Not just discorporated, but _killed_ him if I could. And Gabriel. And—”

“Angel.”

“And the human who killed you.” He looked up at Crowley, fresh waves of pain in his gaze. “I didn’t care that Beelzebub strangled him. I didn’t give him a second thought. I could have asked Pepper about him, I suppose, but I never did. I didn’t want to know. Adam died so those souls wouldn’t be judged. Pepper convinced Death to take early retirement so she could find a way to make it gentler. You got yourself killed for a demon who tried to murder you with holy water. But I—who is, need I remind you, supposed to be an _actual_ angel—”

Crowley cupped a hand around Aziraphale’s neck and yanked him forward. “I still love you. Whether you’re kind or cruel. _Don’t_ leave me alone anymore. When we’re down, we stay together.” 

A choked sob escaped Aziraphale, almost a laugh. “You think I don’t realize that _now_? I lost you. Not almost, but you were actually—and I shouldn’t have you back—shouldn’t get this chance, after I’ve mucked up _so many_ chances before.” And then he was crying in earnest, something helpless, desperate coming up from within. 

“Well.” Crowley cleared his throat, straightened the scarf around his neck, and looked around awkwardly. “Didn’t mean to make you—well, you know—do that leaking thing—”

“And I’m supposed to care about the humans. Because you did. Do.” Aziraphale squeezed his eyes shut and Crowley noticed the lines around them now, the fatigue. “But I couldn’t, then. I could just go through the motions, knowing you were dead, hoping I’d be dead soon too.” 

Crowley made a strangled noise. 

“I don’t know what She made us, but it can’t be any good, if I gave up on the entirety of the human race after you were gone.” Aziraphale jerked away. “Oh, Crowley, what am I doing. I’m even more useless than before.” 

There were several beats of silence after that where Crowley felt absolutely certain he should know what to say and equally certain he didn’t. Aziraphale’s tired eyes finally chanced upwards, rimmed red with exhaustion.

“I’m so sorry,” Crowley croaked. 

“For Beelzebub,” Aziraphale whispered. “Of all the—”

“But you still—you still did it. Didn’t you?” Crowley whispered. “I spoke with Anathema and Newt. I know you burned yourself out afterwards trying to protect them all. And you—well, you might not always feel it, but you’ll always stand up for them, and that’s what counts, yeah? The doing, not the feeling?”

Aziraphale opened his mouth, shook his head, and then allowed a small smile. “I’d love to believe you, dear.”

_Dear._ It had been so long. Crowley leaned down to press his forehead to Aziraphale’s. “Then do, Angel.”

It was as if the noise around them, instead of stopping, grew louder. The people and the birds and the street behind the park. It filled them, surrounded them, this world. They all went on and the angel and demon stood stopped, for once, stopped in time.

Eyes closed, Aziraphale whispered, “I don’t know what we are now but I don’t think I’ll ever be good enough.”

“We won’t strive for anything, then. We won’t find our way. There is none.”

Aziraphale opened his eyes, offered a small smile. “But we’ll give a damn.”

And Crowley, relieved, returned it. “About anything at all.” 

***

I lay down my hand and find a new and brilliant and brief constellation in the night sky. 

And I know that soon enough, they will see it too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so, so much for reading, leaving kudos, and especially comments on this story. It was at times difficult but rewarding to finally finish it. I hope you enjoy. <3
> 
> And feel free to find me on Tumblr at [Terrible-Titles](https://terrible-titles.tumblr.com)


End file.
